“What questions do I want to explore through my senior thesis?”
This key question runs through every Princeton undergraduate student’s mind at some point during their undergraduate career. They choose a topic, spend a year or longer diving deeply into their subject, make unexpected discoveries, face unanticipated challenges, and finally emerge from the process with a thesis. It’s one of the most important milestones of the Princeton experience.
Students in the Lewis Center for the Arts pursuing a minor in Creative Writing, Dance, Theater and Music Theater, or Visual Arts have the opportunity to do an independent project to cap their work towards the minor. This optional project might be one and the same as their thesis project for their major, it might be a separate project entirely, or it might intersect at various points with their thesis topic. Princeton’s liberal arts approach encourages interdisciplinary exploration, particularly in the arts.
Discover how six Princeton seniors—School of Public and International Affairs major Vivian Bui, Physics major Matthew Cooperberg, English major Ava Kronman, Practice of Art major Alex Picoult, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering major Annalise Schuck, and Economics major Grace Wang—utilized the expansive reach of theater to connect to a breadth of thesis topics. All earning minors in the Program in Theater and Music Theater, they were inspired to bring what they learned in the theater studio back to the physics or engineering lab, teaching classroom, and research library, or vice versa.
Senior Reflections
Tell us about your senior thesis project that also served as your independent research for the Minor in Theater and Music Theater.
For her Theater&… presentation, Vivian Bui ’26 explains her research that lies at the intersection of theater and public policy. Photo by Daeun Kim
Vivian Bui: My senior thesis, an over 100-page research paper titled “A New Playbook: The May 2025 NEA Grant Cancellations, Identity-Focused Nonprofit Theater, and the Latest Culture War,” served simultaneously as my senior independent work for the theater minor and my thesis for my major in public policy at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA). I was advised by Professor Stanley Nider Katz (SPIA) and Professor Stacy Wolf (Theater). I am also completing an American Studies minor at the Effron Center for the Study of America. My thesis sits directly at the intersection of theater and public policy, showing the major role that the arts have in American politics and how policy affects all aspects of life, including the arts and culture.
Annalise Schuck: My independent work project sits at the crossroads of my mechanical engineering major and my theater minor. I’m working on a new design for a theatrical stage wherein four-foot panels of flooring are able to lift up and down, as well as tilt side to side, by remote control. My goal is to create a stage that can be reconfigured remotely, perhaps multiple times in one show, to form an ADA-compliant ramp, or a vertical lift, or any number of other accessible design configurations. This type of machine already exists—it’s generally called a Stewart platform—and it is often used in things like flight simulators, high-precision surgical robots, and more. However, it is not currently used in this context of theatrical accessibility and scenic design, so that’s where I get to do most of my research and innovation! My Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) advisor is Michael Littman, Director of Undergraduate Studies for the MAE Department. My advisors through theater were Michael Maag, a lighting expert with disabilities who works at a major theater company and Jane Cox, lighting designer and director of the program in theater.
Matthew Cooperberg: For my thesis I designed an experiment in order to test the effectiveness of the mode of theater and the analogical throughline of queer experiences/theory to teach fundamentals of quantum mechanics. To do this I wrote a play, Liminality, which I also directed and was produced by the Lewis Center for the Arts. The play followed two central characters each in their own worlds. In one world was Quinn, a stubbornly determined college student, attempting to disprove quantum mechanics. In the other world was Grace, who was trying to find their gender identity after a moment of realization and gender dysphoria. Both characters then conducted several experiments to try and achieve their respective goals, each egged on from the sidelines by a mysterious character named Kit who seemed to traverse both of their separate worlds.
The way that I decided to write this play was informed by different teaching methods for physics–in particular, quantum mechanics. Much of my research for my thesis was centered on this sort of scholarship. My primary advisor was Associate Professor of Theater Brian Herrera with my second reader being Professor of Physics Simone Giombi. My rehearsal process advisor was Shariffa Ali.
Describe how your senior independent work for the theater minor is companion to your thesis for your major.
Alex Picoult: My thesis in the Department of Art and Archaeology’s History of Art track, advised by Professor Rachael Z. DeLue, is titled “Metabolism, Capsule Living, and the Nakagin Tower: A Dialogue between Kiyoshi Awazu and Noritaka Minami.” The work explores the downfall of the postwar utopian architecture craze through a case study of Metabolism—a Japanese architectural movement in the 1960-70s led by Kisho Kurokawa. Revolving around Kurokawa’s famous Nakagin Capsule Tower, I crafted a dialogue between graphic designer Awazu (who worked for Kurokawa in the ’60s) and contemporary artist Minami (who captured a photographic collection of the tower in its final years) to track the visual language of Metabolism over time. My thesis culminates in a broader discussion of the pitfalls of utopian architecture in residential living spaces, seeking to understand why the aesthetic exists in the modern day only in entertainment spaces such as film, theater, and theme parks.
For my independent work in the Program in Theater and Music Theater, advised by Associate Professor Brian Herrera, I crafted an interactive booklet called Future Worlds. The booklet prompts the reader to construct small architectural models called ‘plates’– each chapter of the thesis is accompanied by a plate that conceptually relates to its contents. When the reader has finished, they will have theoretically completed six plates that they can now manipulate and rearrange to form different spatial relationships and transportation patterns. The booklet is intended to foster an active engagement with visions for utopian living and reinject the often-isolating structures of capsule architecture with life, autonomy, and agency.
Alex Picoult ‘26, an Art & Archaeology major pursuing a minor in Theater, presents his thesis work exploring utopian architecture and an interactive booklet design. Photo by Daeun Kim
Ava Kronman: My senior independent research in theater explores teachers’ positive impacts in the Princeton community and in my life personally. This involved analyzing interdisciplinary lessons that theater teaches, including many that have shaped who I am as a teaching artist. My English thesis is my first attempt at writing a full-length, educational theater resource. I created an edition of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night with an acting guide for secondary students. I believe that improving access to and engagement with the arts is essential, and my projects in both theater and English ask how that might be possible. This work has been thrilling.
Grace Wang: My senior independent work in economics studies the Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal program to employ out-of-work theater artists that operated from 1935-1939. The program is unique in U.S. history as it made theater accessible to the public, with attendance at Federal Theatre productions totaling over 30 million patrons, which was about a quarter of the U.S. population at the time. For my thesis, advised by economics Professor Ilyana Kuziemko, I digitized the program’s complete production record to look at how geographic exposure to Federal Theatre premieres affected voter turnout. I also examined the effects on civic engagement and political participation, such as community volunteering and organizing.
For my theater minor, I also wrote an original play that was produced as part of the theater program’s season exploring themes of insecurity, emotional upheaval, and the challenges of communication. The play, titled Dependence, is a dramatic comedy about two filmmakers navigating the end of both their artistic and personal relationship, and how their reliance on each other breeds irrational decision-making and explosive conflict. Professor Lloyd Suh served as my theater thesis advisor.
How do you see your studies in one area connecting to the other?
Vivian Bui: In May 2025, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) unexpectedly cancelled millions of dollars in previously awarded grants following President Trump’s executive orders banning federal programs from promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and “gender ideology.” During my senior year, I investigated the impact of these cancellations on five identity-focused nonprofit theaters in New York City, drawing on interviews with organization leaders and arts policy experts, legal filings, news coverage, and research on American culture wars. Due to the recency of these events, academic analysis of this event remains limited. My thesis provides one of the first sustained historical records of how these cancellations unfolded and how affected organizations responded. The history of conservatives targeting the arts in broader political conflicts is not new, but my thesis argues that the May 2025 cancellations represent a meaningfully new strategy, or “playbook,” for right-wing-led culture wars.
Ava Kronman: My primary interest in English is dramatic literature, specifically Shakespeare, so every class I have taken for the major speaks to my theater courses. I am on the Track in Theater in the Department of English, too. This means that I was able to credit two theater classes towards my major, and these ended up informing my approach to my thesis. Studying both disciplines has made me a stronger researcher, artist, and teacher.
In her presentation, Princeton senior Ava Kronman ’26 reflected on interdisciplinary lessons and the positive impact of teachers. Photo by Angel Chang Liu
Alex Picoult: My studies in art history have always been guided by my interest in immersive spaces. I tend to center my research around postwar science fiction film, the post-human, and space-age architecture, seeking to understand how the design and visual language of utopian and dystopian spaces affects our existence within them. I believe this has two distinct connections to theatrical design practices. First, one can understand persons inhabiting a public or private space as actors in a performance space. Second, understanding spatial and architectural design in real life is akin to stage design.
It is through these two veins that I can apply both conceptual performance theory and technical design practices to the art historical discipline. I have found that this intersection allows me to engage with architectural design in a more humanist lens, which proved necessary for my thesis to evaluate the effects of capsule living on its ‘performers.’
Annalise Schuck: As someone whose theater background is largely technical and design-focused, I see my theater work and my engineering work as inextricable from each other. To me, both are about bringing to life concepts that begin in the imagination. In this case, I felt that my engineering background was able to fulfill a particular need in the theater world, and that was a great motivator.
Grace Wang: For my thesis in economics, I was interested in seeing if I could empirically capture the socio-political impacts of theater exposure by studying a moment in U.S. history when the form was made accessible to the public and used to reckon with contemporary social issues. I looked specifically at the Federal Theatre pieces on topics like antifascism, affordable housing, or public health, which were the ones that received the most news coverage, and which I hypothesized would contribute to larger effects on political participation outcomes. The process of doing this research has made me think critically in my playwriting practice about the stories I want to tell. It’s made clear to me that the stories that challenge an audience to think differently or cost something to tell are usually the ones most worth telling.
Matthew Cooperberg: One of the central connections that I drew was how both quantum mechanics and queerness deal with fundamental uncertainty and unknowability in some areas. For quantum mechanics, that shows up in how it is built from first principles on a bed of probability and certain huge consequences such as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This principle means we can’t know where and how fast a particle is moving at the same time, which is something that is not an issue for the physics of the everyday world. For queerness, this uncertainty and unknowability shows up in the vastness of identity possibilities and the struggle that many people experience, myself included, with trying to figure out what their identity is—if it’s something that they can determine at all.
What about theater made it a useful discipline through which to explore your major thesis?
Students perform a dress rehearsal for Liminality by Matthew Cooperberg ’26. Photo by Michael Paras
Annalise Schuck: Theater was a particularly useful way to explore my mechanical engineering work because it provided a long list of interesting challenges for me to tackle. How do you confirm that a moving structure like this will be safe to hold people and scenery? How do you ensure that movement of platforms is consistent, so nothing comes as a surprise to live performers? What’s your control mechanism for an operator backstage? Balancing safety, aesthetics, and the practical limitations of theatrical spaces gave me a lot to think about.
Matthew Cooperberg: Many of the overlaps I saw between queerness and quantum mechanics were complicated to explain, especially to someone who was not well-versed in either queer theory/experiences or quantum mechanics. I could have told them what I was trying to communicate to them, but I don’t believe that it would have been effective for me to just lecture or write a paper to communicate such a nuanced and complex bit of theory. Instead, I wanted to see if I could get people to see these connections for themselves by putting them side by side in a play. That way, I could take advantage of an audience’s curiosity to have them draw these conclusions for themselves by simply putting the two theories into conversation with one another–sometimes literally.
This is why I decided to write a play as my means of communication. I firmly believe that the best way to represent queerness is by demonstrating specific queer identities rather than trying to generalize, as this is a realm in which generalizations don’t get you very far due to the vastness of queer experiences. Therefore, a play would suit exactly what I wanted by allowing me to focus on the specific, rather than the general, in terms of queerness.
Ava Kronman: Theater at the Lewis Center is expansive. I have worked backstage, on stage, in visual arts studios, in the writer’s room, as a director…you name it! Theater constantly gives me new hats to wear, and from these experiences I also gain new perspectives that I can bring to my analysis of literature.
What about your major area of study made it a useful lens to examine an aspect of theater?
Tate Keuler ’26 and Ella Williams ’29 perform in Dependence by Grace Wang ’26. Photo by James Han
Grace Wang: The aspects of the economics discipline that I find most compelling are its empirical methods that allow us to study all kinds of social scientific phenomena. There is plenty of empirical research in economics on the effects of media like film, radio, or television on socio-politics, however much less work has been done on theater. Similarly, no scholarship on the socio-politics of Federal Theatre had yet looked at it through a data-driven lens. When I found data on Federal Theatre that I could digitize to form the basis of my paper, I thought it was an exciting opportunity to explore a social science question that I find important using the research methods I am trained in.
Matthew Cooperberg: As for quantum mechanics, the three primary teaching methods I used were demonstrations, problem solving, and analogies. All three of these are very well suited to a play. Demonstrations are equally effective in this medium as when performed in front of a lecture hall. Additionally, I can have the audience follow the problem solving journey of the characters—not just to allow them to see the literal physics being done, but also to empathize with the characters, making the solving of said problems all the more important to the audience. Lastly, what better mode to demonstrate analogy than art? The play gave me so many avenues through which to explore the connection between queerness and quantum beyond the theoretical similarities and in a medium that I was already so comfortable with and loved so much.
Does this combined work relate to what you plan to pursue post-graduation? If so, what plans do you have?
Vivian Bui: After graduating from Princeton, I hope to attend law school and advocate for communities that have shaped who I am, including the arts. Arts policy remains underexplored relative to its significance, and I believe that a fuller understanding of the relationship between the arts and public policy allows for stronger American democracy.
Ava Kronman: Yes, this combined work allowed me to apply the research skills I have honed in theater and English over the past four years to topics within education. After graduation, I will be pursuing my Master’s in Secondary English Education and teaching licensure at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Annalise Schuck ’26, a Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering major with a minor in Theater, delivers a presentation on re-engineering theater spaces and systems for greater accessibility during a Theater&… presentation in the Drapkin on April 24, 2026. Photo by Daeun Kim
Alex Picoult: My thesis and independent work in theater have very serendipitously aligned with my future career plans. Beginning in the fall, I am pursuing an Interior Design M.F.A. at Pratt Institute. After working with the Nakagin Tower so closely for the past year, I hope to further explore the use of space-age aesthetics in interior spaces during my M.F.A. program. After graduate school, I plan to apply my interior design skills to the design of immersive spaces in general, as I’ve always wanted to become a theme park designer.
Matthew Cooperberg: Post-Princeton I am primarily going to be working on my company, House of Bones Theater Company, which I co-founded with fellow Princeton student Ash Baudelaire. I do also plan to continue to write plays like Liminality somewhere down the line, and I already have a couple of ideas for what I would want to explore.
Annalise Schuck: Scenic automation and re-engineering spaces for accessibility are both areas I am interested in pursuing post-grad, but I haven’t yet officially decided where I will go after Princeton.
Grace Wang: After Princeton, I’ll be continuing to do empirical social science research as a research assistant in New York City, as well as writing plays and pursuing as many theatrical opportunities as I can in the city.
What will you remember most, or what are you most proud of, with your senior thesis and theater independent work?
Matthew Cooperberg: The most important thing that can come of this project at Princeton is for it to open the doors to another student in the future who wants to try a crazy idea like writing a play for a thesis in the Princeton Physics Department. I hope that the complicated steps that I had to take to accomplish this project can serve as stepping stones to those who come in the future.
Vivian Bui: What I am most proud of with my thesis is the fact that I was able to document a story about a contemporary policy event that affected the arts community that may go unnoticed or forgotten by the general public within a couple years.
Ava Kronman: My advisors are fantastic. I am so grateful to be learning from Dr. Rhaisa Williams in the theater program, Professor Tamsen Wolff in English, and Professor Chesney Snow, who is my mentor in the Track in Community Engaged Theater. They have supported me and encouraged me to embrace experiences that were new to me, and I have become a far stronger academic and more outspoken person because of them.
Annalise Schuck: Importantly, the Program in Theater’s “process over product” mantra has helped me view my thesis as a unique learning opportunity, ripe with chances to explore and iterate upon my work, and these chances are truly the heart of the engineering design process.
